typography

i have been reading an exciting book called “design writing research”, by Ellen Lupton&Abbott Miller. What i like about the book is the clarity and the integrity (of a well designed book and well articulated content).They have a website related to the book:

http://www.designwritingresearch.org/

here are some highlights from the Deconstructionism article:

deconstruction asks how representation inhabits reality.how does the external image of thing get inside their internal essence?how does the surface get under the skin?

the alphabet, in principal, represents the sounds of speech by reducingthem to a finite set of repeatable marks;

typography is but one of the media through which this repetition occurs. the letter a might be carve in stone, written in pencil, or printed from an engraved block, but only the last is properly speaking, typographic. typographic production involves composing identical lettters into lines of text. the characters might be generated from relief surfaces, made of wood, metal, or rubber, or from a photographic negative, a digital code, or a paper stencil.

the art typography includes the design of letter-forms for reproduction and the arrangement of characters into lines of text. typographic features includes the choice of typefaces; the spacing of letters, word, lines, and columns, and the pattern formed by these graphic distinctions across the body of a document.

Post-structuralism is an attitude, not a style.

“death of the author”, which asserts that the interior self is constructed by external systems and technologies.

invention and revolution result from tactical aggressions against grid.

deconstruction in architecture ask questions about modernism by re-examining its own language, materials, and processes.

rather than looking at deconstruction as a historical style, or period, we see deconstruction as a critical process-an act of questioning.

Ferdinand Saussure asserted that the meaning of signs does not reside in the signs themselves: there is no natural bond between the signifier (the sign’s material aspect) and the signified (its referent). instead, the meaning of a sign comes only from its relationship to other signs in a system. this principle is the basis of structuralism, which focuses on patterns or structures that generate meaning rather than on the content of a given code or system.

to deconstruct the relationship between speech and writing is to reverse the status of the two terms, but not just to replace one with the other. deconstruction aims to show that speech is, at bottom, characterized by the same failure to transparently reflect reality, by the same internal emptiness.

so how about the function and the aesthetics of the deconstructionist design? koz

spacing, framing, punctuation, type style, layout, and other non-phonetic structures of difference constitute the material interface of writing. traditional literary and linguistic research overlooks such graphic forms, focusing instead on the Word as the center of communication. according to Derrida, the functions of repetition, quotation, and fragmentation that characterize writing are condition endemic to all human expression.